[47] Houghton MSS.
[48] The house is now known as Lawn Bank, the two blocks having been thrown into one, with certain alterations and additions which in the summer of 1885 were pointed out to me in detail by Mr William Dilke, the then surviving brother of Keats’s friend.
[51] Decamerone, Giorn., iv. nov. 5. A very different metrical treatment of the same subject was attempted and published, almost simultaneously with that of Keats, by Barry Cornwall in his Sicilian Story (1820). Of the metrical tales from Boccaccio which Reynolds had agreed to write concurrently with Keats (see above, [p. 86]), two were finished and published by him after Keats’s death in the volume called A Garden of Florence (1821).
[52] As to the date when Hyperion was written, see Appendix, [p. 228]: and as to the error by which Keats’s later recast of his work has been taken for an earlier draft, ibid., [p. 230].
[53] If we want to see Greek themes treated in a Greek manner by predecessors or contemporaries of Keats, we can do so—though only on a cameo scale—in the best idyls of Chénier in France, as L’Aveugle or Le Jeune Malade, or of Landor in England, as the Hamadryad or Enallos and Cymodamia; poems which would hardly have been written otherwise at Alexandria in the days of Theocritus.
[54] We are not surprised to hear of Keats, with his instinct for the best, that what he most liked in Chatterton’s work was the minstrel’s song in Ælla, that fantasia, so to speak, executed really with genius on the theme of one of Ophelia’s songs in Hamlet.
[55] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the deaths of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rhyme. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines,